I need to migrate my email, how do we make that happen?

This is a common question, and while the process is typically very simple and straight forward, a number of things need to happen, in order, to prevent any interruption to your email service.

Note: This only applies to hosted email accounts (yourname@yourdomain.com) If you have an email account through another provider's domain (i.e. google.com, kitcarson.net, etc.) you'll need an IT person to help you find another solution.

So how do we do this? - First and foremost (this is the most common error) do not change your name servers or MX records before coordinating with us! We have to set up your accounts on our servers first. If you start sending mail to our servers before that's done, it's just going to bounce.

The full procedure is as follows:

Send us a full list of your existing email accounts, and the passwords for each. We'll set these up on our servers with the same passwords, which you can change later if you wish.

Once that's done, we'll advise you that it's ok to change DNS, either the name servers, or just the MX records. This will result in all new incoming mail going to our servers, so it won't show up in your Outlook, Mac Mail, etc. yet. You can check for new email through http://webmail.brownrice.com during the transition.

We'll run a program on our mail server which acts as an IMAP client, and pulls all your messages from the old server, over to ours. It authenticates with a username and password, just like Outlook, which is why we need the account passwords. If you're not comfortable divulging that info, you can set a temporary password with your current host.

Once all your email messages have been migrated to our server, we'll advise you that it's ok to change your email client settings to connect to us. The settings to do this can be found here: What are my email server settings?

That's it! Once your Outlook, MacMail, Thunderbird, etc. is connected to our server, you'll see all your messages just like before, rovided the above steps were done in the correct order.